40 Chapter 2 BACKGROUND The beliefs medical educators hold about teaching, learning, and knowledge determine to a large extent their teaching approaches.1-5 Because personal educational beliefs drive educators’ behaviour while teaching, these beliefs should be considered a starting point from which to improve the quality of education.6,7 Supporting this view, Kember and Kwan stated that fundamental changes to the quality of education rely on changes in educational beliefs.8 Thus, obtaining more insight into those beliefs is important for the quality of education and may help us to understand why education reform can be cumbersome and faculty development often falls short of changing pedagogical practices.9 Within the context of higher education a number of studies have explored the educational beliefs of educators and have proposed classification rubrics.2,6,8,10-15 Such classifications are useful to distinguish between beliefs in a structured way and provide insight into relevant aspects of educational beliefs. However, these classification studies have not been conducted in the field of medical education. Our study addresses a framework that can be used in learning-centred rather than teaching-centred curricula, since currently most medical curricula have adopted learning-centred approaches. We propose a beliefs framework to improve suitability in the context of contemporary medical education. Belief orientations Prior classification studies2,6,8,10-15 have classified beliefs as global orientations in a continuum, ranging from teaching-centred to learning-centred. While teachingcentred belief orientations focus on the transmission of defined content or knowledge, learning-centred belief orientations focus on students’ conceptual understanding and development. Light and Calkins15 describe a classification differentiating three belief orientations: teaching-centred, intermediate, and learning-centred. However, they do not base their classification on a fixed set of ‘dimensions,’ by which is meant qualitatively different aspects of beliefs. Another classification proposed by Postareff and Lindblom-Ylänne11 distinguishes ten different dimensions of beliefs about teaching, learning, and knowledge, structured into four groups. However, this study only differentiates the two belief orientations: teaching-centred and learning-centred. Framework of educational beliefs The primary reason that we chose the framework of Samuelowicz and Bain14 as the starting point for our study was that in higher education literature their
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